WHAT IS GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY? New Measures and Relevance for Quality of Government

MONIKA BAUHR

MARCIA GRIMES

WORKING PAPER SERIES 2012:16 QOG THE QUALITY OF GOVERNMENT INSTITUTE

Department of Political Science University of Gothenburg Box 711, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG December 2012 ISSN 1653-8919 © 2012 by Monika Bauhr and Marcia Grimes. All rights reserved.

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What is Government Transparency? - New Measures and Relevance for Quality of Government Monika Bauhr Marcia Grimes QoG Working Paper Series 2012:16 December 2012 ISSN 1653-8919

ABSTRACT

As policymakers and researchers focus increasing attention on the importance of government transparency for accountability and good governance more generally, the demand for greater con-ceptual clarity and authoritative measures of government transparency increases. Transparency advocates maintain that greater access to government information is the sine qua non of greater accountability and better quality of government in the long term. As a concept, transparency is, similar to rule of law or democracy, difficult to capture with single empirical indicators. This paper introduces a set of measures that we argue together capture key components of government trans-parency: government openness, whistleblower protection and likelihood of exposure (or publicity). The transparency data, collected through an expert survey carried out by the Quality of Government Institute, currently cover 52 countries with additional countries to be added in subse-quent surveys. This paper explores these new measures in an effort to determine their validity and robustness.

Monika Bauhr The Quality of Government Institute Department of Political Science University of Gothenburg monika.bauhr@pol.gu.se

Marcia Grimes The Quality of Government Institute Department of Political Science University of Gothenburg marcia.grimes@pol.gu.se

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Introduction

In the last decade, the transparency movement has gained momentum; international organizations

and NGOs advocate transparency as a necessary condition for better government quality, greater

accountability and a more limited scope for corruption and impunity (UN-HABITAT and Trans-

parency International, 2004; Islam, 2006; Kaufmann, et al., 2002; Kurtzman, et al., 2004; IMF,

2001; UNODC, 2004; CEPA, 2009). The theoretical arguments behind the instrumental value of

transparency are by now well-established. (Stiglitz 2002) and the concept of transparency has been

the subject of a number of studies in such varying fields as negotiation theory (Stasavage 2004),

international security (Florini 2002), regime effectiveness (Mitchell 1998). However, an agreed upon

definition of the concept of transparency is lacking (Relly & Sabharwal 2009; Florini 2007). Trans-

parency is often conflated with “good governance” more generally which limits its applicability and

lead to difficulties in finding good operationalizations of the term (Grigorescu 2003)

This paper suggests a new and more theoretically founded operationalization of the concept of

transparency. We suggest that transparency can be measured along three principal dimensions:

government openness, whistleblower protection and publicity. These dimensions of transparency

are explored using new data from the QoG expert survey. In an effort to explore and confirm the

validity of these new measures, we compare our scores to currently available measures and data on

transparency, and examine whether these new measures behave as relevant theories predict. In this

vein, we analyze the relationship between these dimensions of transparency and a number of relat-

ed areas, including corruption and quality of government, democracy and basic human rights. The

analyses, still somewhat preliminary, suggest that the measures for government openness and pub-

licity concur with theoretical predictions, but we find reason to doubt the whistleblower protections

measure. Combined in an index, the three measures together perform as well as existing transpar-

ency measures but offer considerable advantages in terms of conceptual stringency and parsimony.

The paper is structured as follows. Section one introduces our three central dimensions of

transparency: government openness, whistleblower protection and publicity and discusses these

dimensions in relation to current theoretical ideas of the concept of transparency. Section two in-

troduces our new measure of transparency from the quality of government expert survey, as well as

other data and measurements used in our analysis. Section three then presents an exploratory analy-

sis of the association between the new measures of transparency and good government, and section

four concludes

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Dimensions of Transparency

Given the political importance of transparency and the growing international interest in promoting

it, it is lamentable (though perhaps not surprising) that there are currently no commonly agreed

upon definition of the concept of transparency. Transparency is a multifaceted concept that is often

conflated with accountability or even corruption, impartiality, and rule of law. Christopher Hood

traces the history of the concept and identifies the "broadest doctrine of openness" as "...the doc-

trine that the general conduct of executive government should be predictable and operate according

to published (and as far as possible non-discretionary) rules rather than arbitrarily" (Hood 2006,

14). Hood's analysis illustrates the tendency for transparency to bleed conceptually into other equal-

ly compelling normative standards such as rule of law, accountability, public participation, and de-

liberative democracy. As another example, The World Trade Organization states that ensuring

“transparency” in international commercial treaties typically involves three core requirements: (i) to

make information on relevant laws, regulations and other policies publicly available, (ii) to notify

interested parties of relevant laws and regulations and changes to them; and (iii) to ensure that laws

and regulations are administered in a uniform, impartial and reasonable manner (Bellver & Kauf-

man 2004). This definition includes not only making information available and accessible to stake-

holders, but also that laws and regulations are administered and implemented in an impartial and

predictable manner.

Transparency is sometimes more narrowly defined as “the release of information which is rel-

evant for evaluating institutions” (Bauhr & Nasiritousi forthcoming).1 Using a terminology derived

from the principal agent framework, Lindstedt and Naurin make a distinction between agent con-

trolled and non-agent controlled transparency. The release of government information by govern-

ments can be seen as a typical instance of agent controlled transparency, while the use of that in-

formation by external actors, such as the media, NGO or citizens is non-agent controlled. 2

Vishwanath and Kaufmann (1999) and Kaufmann (2002) define transparency as the “increased

flow of timely and reliable economic, social and political information, which is accessible to all rele-

vant stakeholders”. This perspective emphasizes not only the availability of information, but also its

reliability and accessibility to a range of potential agents.

1 For a discussion of definitions of transparency, see Bellver and Kaufmann 2005. Cf Florini’s “regulation by revelation”

as the third wave of environmental governance (Florini 1998) and “governance-by-disclosure” (Gupta 2008). 2 If this distinction is made, non agent controlled transparency can be a condition for agent controlled transparency to

reduce corruption ( Lindstedt & Naurin 2010)

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These definitions comprehensively capture a broad range of aspects related to government

transparency and therefore offer valuable baseline definitions. Exploring the effects of transparency

may, however, require definitions more specifically tailored to the theoretical predictions under

examination. Narrowing the theoretical scope facilitates the formulation of measurement tools, and

may entail focusing on a specific policy sector, or a specific aspect of the broader construct. As

much of the policy literature today focuses on the role of transparency in reducing corruption, we

find it compelling to explore what aspects more precisely might be necessary in order for transpar-

ency to enhance accountability and contribute to bringing about good government. A key compo-

nent of the definition is the emphasis not only on the provision of information, but also the ability

of external actors to demand and gain access to information not provided routinely by political and

administrative institutions, i.e. both agent-controlled transparency but, importantly, also non-agent

controlled transparency. We therefore define transparency as the availability of, and feasibility for

actors both internal and external to state operations to access and disseminate information relevant

to evaluating institutions, both in terms of rules, operations as well as outcomes.

Recent decades have seen a stark increase in the number of studies using cross country data on

governance. Among the most widely used and widely accepted measures of governance are the

World Bank Governance indicators or TI corruption perception index Surprisingly, there is cur-

rently no similar widely accepted measure of transparency. Although the governance indexes have

received a fair amount of criticism, not least for being perception based, they are widely used

among both researchers and policy makers.3 No transparency index has, however, so far attained a

similar level of acceptance.

This deficit of data, as subsequent dearth of empirical investigations of comparative explora-

tions of the causes and effects of varying levels of government transparency, stems in part from the

empirical and analytical ambiguities, as well as normative complexity, surrounding the concept of

transparency. Like many governance-related concepts, transparency contains a host of contested

issues: where to draw the line between the principles of transparency and national security, individ-

ual integrity, and corporations' desire for nondisclosure; whether government offices must publish

information proactively or simply provide information upon request; who should incur the cost of

information provision (public offices versus those seeking access); whether access to information is

3 Studies have, for instance, called into questions their usefulness for making comparisons, in particular over time. They

have also been criticized for containing biases in individual indicators and for issues pertaining to their construct validity (Arndt and Oman, 2006; Knack, 2006; Thomas, 2010) For a more comprehensive review of this critique and answers to the criticism made, see Kaufmann et al., 2007. See also Galtung, et al., 2006 and Olken 2005.

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sufficient and meaningful absent conditions such as an independent and investigative media, and

institutional arrangements for redressing abuses once brought to light.

In the literature examining transparency empirically, approaches to measurement also vary

considerably. Studies of the effects of transparency have employed one of three approaches to

measurement, either indices comprising a broad spectrum of indicators that conceptually extend

beyond transparency (Bellver and Kaufmann 2005), objective indicators (Grigorescu 2003; Hollyer,

Rosendorff and Vreeland 2010) which, we argue, may be misleading if used to understand causal

relations between transparency and other aspects of good government, or proxy measures, such as

press freedom (Brunetti and Weder 2003) or newspaper circulation (Adesèra, Boix & Payne 2003;

Besley & Burgess 2002), which capture more, but also less, than the theoretical construct of gov-

ernment transparency.

Objective (as opposed to perception-based) measures refer to surveys of government infor-

mation published (primarily) electronically, or reporting of data to international organizations

(Grigorescu 2003; Hollyer, Rosendorff and Vreeland 2010; International Budget Partnership 2010;

West 2005). Such measures offer considerable appeal as they eliminate measurement error resulting

from perception biases and inference based evaluation, i.e. that respondents base assessments of,

for example, corruption on media reporting or the overall political and economic situation in a

country rather than expert or experiential knowledge. These objective measures of transparency

present limitations, however, in that they only capture one aspect of transparency – a government’s

propensity to publish information proactively on the Internet or upon request by international or-

ganizations. While this aspect of transparency is not unimportant, it does not capture whether citi-

zens have the opportunity to request and receive information that goes beyond what the govern-

ment has elected not to publish. Moreover, the extent to which governments effectively publish

information captures the dimension of transparency that is likely to be a consequence of institutional

capacity as it is to be a cause. If the ambition is to determine whether transparency leads to gov-

ernment effectiveness and lowers corruption –questions that neither Grigorescu (2003) nor Hollyer

et al (2010) seek to address – this approach to measuring transparency is problematic.

Bellver & Kaufmann present an index of transparency that instead is quite broad, and builds

on a large number of indicators and measures related to transparency where:

…some of the variables used to construct the indicators originate from

‘objective’ measures of transparency; for example the existence of Free-

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dom of Information laws (Freedom info) or mandatory requirements for

political funding disclosure, the availability of information on official web

sites or online tools for public participation (Global e-government survey

by the Centre for Public Policy or the UN E-government survey), or ‘ob-

jective’ assessments against fiscal, budget and public expenditure bench-

marks (i.e. WB/OECD Budget Practices and Procedures survey or Inter-

national Budget Project). Other individual variables rely on perception-

based measures of transparency from enterprise surveys or polls of experts

from international organizations. (Bellver and Kaufmann 2005:23)

The Bellver and Kaufmann index thus evaluates aspects such as the content, quality and frequency

of the information provided by public institutions and whether the general public is actually getting

that information, as well as whether the decision-making process in public institutions is clear and

transparent. The component measures included in the index also cover several additional issues

such as accountability mechanisms, audit practices, and participatory opportunities.

In this paper, we seek to simplify the measurement of transparency and, taking a page from

the Swedish constitution, generally regarded as the first codified transparency measure, suggest that

transparency comprises three distinct but essential dimensions: government openness, whistleblow-

er protection and publicity. Each of these dimension are discussed below.

Government openness/Access to information

Government openness is defined as the information that the government releases, i.e. the extent to

which governments publish information electronically or available, as well as the extent to which

citizens can demand and receive information not published proactively. Studies interested in gov-

ernment openness sometimes use the existence of access to information (AtI) laws (Relly 2010) to

capture this dimension. However, using legal frameworks to assess actual access to and availability

of information is far from ideal, since countries’ level of implementation of laws varies considerably

between countries. Alaistair Roberts (2006) points out that access to information depends on well-

organized records and a professional civil service. Responding to citizen requests for information

requires well worked-out routines for saving documents and making them available for the public,

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which can be costly in terms of monetary and human resources (Grigorescu 2003; Fenster 2006;

Neuman & Calland 2007; Roberts 2006).

Moreover, access to information laws vary tremendously in their legal and institutional

strength. Mexico’s legislation has received considerable attention and praise for the ease of filing

requests, the time constraints on compliance, clear appeals measures should officials refuse to

comply, and an autonomous institutional responsible for enforcing the AtI law. Both citizens and

non-citizens may request information, but, more importantly, a person does not need to present

proof of identity when requesting information, which grants citizens protection from retaliation.

Loopholes in any of these respects can render access to information legislation quite ineffectual in a

political context used to operating under secrecy.

In our survey, we pose a general question regarding experts' perceptions of the extent to which

government documents and records are open to public access rather than trying to discern the

strength of the laws and the extent to which they are enforced. In other words, we seek to deter-

mine the de facto extent of public access to government information that results from the sum of

the specifics of the legal and institutional.

Whistleblower protection

Whistle-blowing and whistleblower protection has receive increasing attention in recent decades,

fueled by stories such as The Insider, in which Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco company employee revealed

to the media that seven major tobacco companies knew of the dangers of their products, as well as

high-profile incidents in which whistle-blowing might have helped to avert disasters such as the

explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the implosion of Enron. These examples, along with

much of the academic literature, treat whistle-blowing and failure to expose misconduct in corpo-

rate settings. Whistle-blowing in the public sector has, however, received much less attention.

Whistle-blowing is often defined as “the disclosure by organization members (former or current) of

illegal, immoral or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons or organi-

zations that may be able to effect action” (Miceli & Near 1992; see also Miethe & Rothschild 1994;

Dworkin 2002). Whistle-blower protection allows individuals to disclose information despite their

individual connection to, and vulnerability to retaliation from, those in power.

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Specific whistle blower protection laws have been established in over 30 countries today, while

in other countries, whistleblower protection is regulated through labor laws and laws related to

public sector employment. These legal measures vary in the extent to which they discourage the

release of information to external actors (the media), and whether they stipulate rewards for expos-

ing abuses. They also differ, for example, in terms of whether protection from retaliation is circum-

scribed if it is deemed that whistle-blowers did not act in good faith (Callahan, Dworkin and Lewis

2003-2004). The countries that have adopted more comprehensive whistleblower protection laws

include the UK, South Africa, Ghana, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. These

laws include measures aimed at protecting whistleblowers from sanctions, incentives for people to

do so and more proactive laws aimed at changing organizational culture (Banisar 2006). In a num-

ber of countries, whistleblower protection is incorporated in the national freedom of information

law and freedom of press acts. Sweden has one of the oldest freedom of press acts which gives civil

servants the right to anonymously report misdeeds in the public sector, and prohibits journalists

from revealing the identity of sources.

Whistle-blowing is one of the fundamental conditions upon which disclosure of abuses of

power rests. However, despite substantial legal improvements in whistleblower protection laws, the

level implementation of these laws can be expected to vary between countries. The discrepancies

between legal and actual protection of whistleblowers can be expected to be particularly important.

A legal right of protection is difficult to implement, since an organizations retaliation against “trai-

tors” can be sophisticated and subtle and therefore difficult to prosecute.

In our survey we ask expert to assess the risk and severity of retaliation for leakage of abuses

of public power to the media (“Public sector employees risk severe negative consequences if they

pass on information about abuses of public power to the media?”). Again, this means that our ex-

perts were asked to assess not only the legal framework for whistleblower protection but also the

level of actual whistleblower protection.

Publicity

Finally, publicity refers to the extent to which detected improprieties actually stand a reasonable

chance to reach the public and relevant stakeholders. The concept of publicity goes somewhat out-

side the narrowest definition of government transparency, as it factors in the willingness and capac-

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ity of media actors to address and draw attention to abuses once detected. Publicity is sometimes

measured using related constructs, such as press freedom. Subhachalasai (2005) suggests that the

more intense media competition and press freedom, the higher the probability that media reports

corruption. Competition and press freedom would make the media more effective in finding and

exposing corruption. Brunetti and Weder (2003:5) show an association between press freedom and

the level of corruption across countries, and claim that “independent journalists have incentives to

actively investigate any wrongdoing” including other corrupt journalists. However, as pointed to by

a number of studies, a free press does not necessarily mean that it will detect and expose abuses of

power. Besley and Prat (2006) outline how the nature of the market industry can easily lead to me-

dia capture and Kolstad and Wiig warn that “the media may concoct false allegations to increase

profits, or use information to get access to rents.”4

Another measure used to proxy transparency and publicity is newspaper circulation. The

drawback of using this measure for broader cross country analysis is its relationship with economic

development. Here, we move beyond these measures and define publicity as the likelihood of abus-

es being exposed in the media.

About the Quality of Government Survey

This paper introduces and explores data collected in an expert survey carried out by the Quality of

Government Institute between March and November 2010. It covers countries in Africa, Asia,

Latin America, and the Middle East (for details, see Dahlberg et al. 2011). The measurements are

based on experts’ perceptions. Experts were contacted through national, regional and international

organizations and through university web sites. In sum, the survey resulted in a sample of 1414

experts, with a responds rate of 31 percent, or 432 persons. Additionally, 13 persons who respond-

ed to an open link distributed to one network of scholars (where we thus cannot track the number

of potential respondents). This adds up to 445 experts having provided responses for 81 countries.

However, only the 52 countries for which a minimum of 3 experts weighed in are included in the

analyses presented here. Latin America had the largest sample with a response rate of 37.2 percent,

whereas the lowest response rate was found in the Middle East. Important to note, concerning the

geographical coverage, is that African countries south of the Sahara, and also island states in the

4 Kolstad and Wiig 2009:526.

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Pacific and the Caribbean, are greatly underrepresented, and many times absent. Figures 1-3 pro-

vide a list of the countries included.

The survey included three questions capturing the dimensions of transparency government open-

ness, whistleblower protections, and publicity. Each of these individually is arguably insufficient to

enhance accountability and a combination of the three is generally implied in policy debates as a

recipe for attaining better governance. The dimensions are, however, analytically distinct and the

existence of one does not necessarily imply a specific attribute along the other two dimensions.

The dimensions were captured with the following statements to which expert respondents could

agree (7) or disagree (1):

Access to information: Government documents and records are open to public access?

Public sector employees risk severe negative consequences if they pass on information about abuses of public power to

the media?

Publicity: Abuses of power within the public sector are likely to be exposed in the media?

The whistle-blower item is reversed to avoid acquiescent responses. Responses are, however, re-

versed in the empirical analyses to follow so that higher values signal better whistleblower protec-

tion.

Validation against available data

Verifying the validity of the survey responses can be done by various strategies including 1) valida-

tion in light of available qualitative and quantitative data available on transparency, 2) an examina-

tion of the structure of the data and relationship between the three measures, and 3) an exploration

of the convergent validity of the measures. Convergent validity is met when a measure or construct

correlates with variables as predicted by theory. This section deals with the first of these two and

the third is dealt with in subsequent sections.

The country estimates (depicted in Figures 1, 2 and 3) reveal considerable variation among the

countries. Do the expert evaluations concur with available information and analyses? The govern-

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ment openness and whistleblower protection dimensions are treated separately here. Although

analytically interrelated and in some cases regulated under the same legal code, the two are generally

treated in separate literatures, with whistle-blower protections figuring more heavily in discussions

of law and business ethics, and access to information treated in political science and public admin-

istration studies.

With respect to government openness, or access to information, the issue on which qualitative

research has focused most heavily, the estimates plotted in Figure 1 seem plausible. Looking in

particular at the estimates from Latin America, many of the countries that cluster in the upper end

of the access to information scale (Mexico, Peru, Ecuador) have in the last decade implemented

fairly strong legal measures that grant citizens access to government records and policy-related doc-

umentation. Colombia and Costa Rica, which also have strong ratings on access to information,

have not put such laws in place but both have constitutional measures that guarantee citizens access

to information. Constitutional measures tend to provide citizens a comparatively weaker legal foot-

ing to stand on as they generally do not specify procedures for requesting information and (if de-

nied) filing appeals. Chile has only very recently passed an access to information law but once draft-

ed, the law surpassed international standards in terms of the strength of legal guarantees and pro-

tections offered to citizens, suggesting a preexisting normative climate of transparency and open-

ness. Chile and Costa Rica are also widely regarded as having a culture of openness in political insti-

tutions. Toward the other end of the scale, neither Argentina nor Paraguay has any constitutional or

legal protections at the national level regarding access to information. Venezuela, the only country

that has failed to ratify the Nuevo Leon Declaration regarding citizens' right to information in

member countries of the OAS, ranks among the lowest of all the countries in the sample.5

Some countries' scores are, however, more difficult to account for. The United Kingdom

ranks on par with Indonesia and Nepal and while the UK only relatively recently put in place legal

measures to ensure citizens access to information, it seems implausible that the regime was previ-

ously as oblique as the score suggests. Such anomalies suggest that experts use different standards

when evaluating access to information in a country. While respondents in Jamaica may compare

government openness with, for example, other Caribbean nations, experts on the UK system may

instead evaluate their own country based on a normative ideal, and therefore deem government

transparency as insufficient.

5 Information on AtI legislation from an interview by Marcia Grimes with Dario Soto, legal expert on access to infor-

mation at the Organization of American States, 17 December 2009 in Washington D.C.

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The issue of whistleblower protections has received rather little attention in comparative polit-

ical studies. Callahan, Dworkin and Lewis’ (2003-2004) analysis of legal measures to protect and

encourage whistle-blowing in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States offers a rare

exception; Bashir and colleagues (2011) add a case study of deterrents to whistle-blowing in Paki-

stan. Callahan and colleagues’ deem the legal measures in all three countries studied to be compre-

hensive, yet also identify differences in degrees of protection and incentives for whistle-blowing.

The point on which the three countries diverge the most relates to the treatment of internal versus

external whistleblowing. For reasons of employer confidentiality, the U.K. law stipulates that pro-

tection from retaliation applies only if whistleblowers report misdeeds first within the organization,

and resort to external channels only if “evidence of wrongdoing is likely to be concealed or de-

stroyed” (Callahan, Dworkin and Lewis 2003-2004, 890). In Australia, only the state law in New

South Wales authorizes media reports, but only condones such action as a last resort. On the

whole, legislation in all three of these countries prefers internal over external whistleblowing. The

single country study of Pakistan examines praxis rather than laws, and reports that while most civil

servants had observed some form of wrongdoing, very few elected to report the abuse, and that the

rare incidents of whistleblowing in most cases led to some form of retaliation (Bashir et al 2011,

290-291).6 The authors conclude that fear of retaliation but also strong social loyalties within public

sector organizations serve as strong deterrents to disclosing abuses in Pakistan.

The expert assessments of whistleblowing in the U.K. and Australia are somewhat under-

whelming, with Australia rated at 2 on the 1 to 7 scale, and the U.K. at 3, and Pakistan rated as

1.67. Ranking wise, Australia only scores better than Serbia, the United Arab Emirates and Paki-

stan, while the U.K. score of 3 is the median for all countries. At first glance, these rankings do not

seem reasonable in light of the qualitative data discussed above. The legislation in both Australia

and the U.K. was deemed as comprehensive and strong. Keep in mind, however, that the survey

question dealt expressly with external whistle-blowing, i.e. exposing abuses in the media, a praxis

explicitly discouraged in the legislation of both countries. Whether abuses are more likely to be

exposed in countries such as Jordan, Bangladesh, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic (the top

four according to the expert survey) does not entirely obvious. For this reason and other factors

discussed below, we regard this measure with a bit more skepticism than the other two measures.

6 82 percent of 1,762 civil servants surveyed had observed some form of wrongdoing, but only 8 percent of these had

elected to report the problem (Bashir et al 2011, 290-291). Among those who had reported the wrongdoing, an over-whelming 84 percent had experienced some form of retaliation.

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Table 1 provides descriptives of the three measures as well as a factor index that will be dis-

cussed in more detail below. The table reveals that the overall assessments on the three component

measures differ considerably, with publicity, i.e. the likelihood of abuses to be exposed in the me-

dia, rated much more positively as a whole than either government openness or whistleblower pro-

tection. Considering that access to information but even more so whistleblower protection can

both entail strong legal protections as well as in some countries a supportive organizational culture,

this is perhaps not so surprising. Also noteworthy is that of the three measures, the government

openness component shows the greatest variance among countries, which is of course a merit in

measures intended for use in cross-country analyses.

TABLE 1. DESCRIPTIVES OF THREE COMPONENTS OF TRANSPARENCY AND TRANSPARENCY

INDEX

Mean Std dev Min Max

Whistleblower Protection 3.07 0.82 1.00 5.00

Government Openness 3.60 1.16 1.25 6.06

Publicity 4.80 0.98 2.00 7.00

Transparency Index 0 1 -2.63 1.92

Available cross-country also provides a point of reference against which to gauge the validity of the

expert survey assessments. Our three measures of the dimensions of transparency appear to varying

extents to capture the same qualities as existing measures of transparency. Table 1 shows the bivari-

ate associations between our three measures of dimensions of transparency, as well as factor index

building on all three (discussed in next section) with six existing measures: 1) the fraction of statis-

tics requested of states by the World Bank that in fact are reported (Hollyer, Rosendorff & Vree-

land 2010), 2) the Open Budget Index, which rates the extent to which states make budget related

documents available to the public in a timely and comprehensible fashion, and 3 and 4) two

measures from Bellver and Kaufmann (2005) addressing economic and institutional transparency

and political transparency, 5) a third measure from Bellver and Kaufmann combining these two,

and 6) the findings of an access to information study conducted by the Associated Press. Each of

these existing measures offers advantages and disadvantages, some of which have been discussed

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earlier in this paper. As the Bellver and Kaufmann measures have the broadest country coverage,

we revisit it briefly here.

Economic and institutional transparency includes measures of “economic transparency, e-

government, access to information laws, transparency in the budget process, transparency of policy

and transparency of the public sector” (Bellver and Kaufmann 2005, 20), while political transparen-

cy “includes elements such as transparency of political funding, openness of the political system

and freedom of the press to monitor government’s performance and express the people’s voice” (p.

22). As discussed above, the Bellver and Kaufmann measures offer numerous advantages, foremost

among which is the breadth of sources drawn upon, which increases the reliability of the measure

but also introduces conceptual fuzziness. The economic and institutional transparency measure, the

indicator most conceptually akin to the QoG survey measures, builds on 13 sources, eight of which

capture not only the availability/ accessibility of information regarding policy and government

activities, but also corruption, accountability structures, audit practices, participatory opportunities,

the ability of citizens to carry out and pay for government services online, and the extent to which

the populous has access to the internet. While all of these are related to transparency, they extend

well beyond standard definitions of the concept, making it difficult to know if any observed associ-

ations with other factors teach us about the effects of transparency or whether they reflect a tauto-

logical association. The Open Budget Index also includes measures that span into the issues of

participation, audit and accountability more generally.

The Associated Press data, in contrast, captures a much more concise aspect of transparency,

namely the extent to which states honor their own access to information laws. The investigation

consisted of submitting requests to 105 governments regarding arrests and convictions related to

terrorism. Governments’ reactions were then coded as responsive (coded numerically as 3), partially

responsive useful (2), partially responsive not useful (1), unresponsive (0) or rejected (0). The de-

scription of the methodology7 leaves many questions unanswered, however, such as the extent to

which requests were tailored to the specific circumstances of each country, and whether journalists

followed up the requests in a similar way in all countries. Moreover, while extremely valuable for

exploring de facto rather than de jure access to information, the measure builds on a single data

point. More surveys of this kind would be highly welcome in the future.

7 Available at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/267193-methodology.html

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Examining the link between our measures and these existing measures can both increase con-

fidence in our own measures while also shedding light on whether the existing measures concur

with country experts’ assessments of government openness. Both access to information and public-

ity correlate fairly strongly with all the existing transparency measures (with the exception of the

extent to which states submit the requested information to the World Bank, ‘Fraction of variables’,

in Table 2). The correlation with each of Bellver and Kaufmann measures is around 0.6 and with

their combined measure circa 0.7; with the publicity measure, the coefficients are somewhat lower.

The whistleblower measure only correlates with the Hollyer et al measure, though this effect disap-

pears if the United Arab Emirates is excluded.8

TABLE 2. BIVARIATE ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN TRANSPARENCY MEASURES FROM QOG EX-

PERT SURVEY AND OTHER SOURCES (PEARSON’S R)

Government openness

Whistleblower protection

Publicity Transparency index

Fraction of variables reported to WB

0.04 0.29* 0.12 0.17

Open Budget Index N=40

0.48* -0.04 0.47* 0.51*

Economic & Institutional Transparency

0.59* 0.10 0.37* 0.56*

Political Transparency

0.63* 0.18 0.45* 0.65*

Overall Transparency

0.69* 0.16 0.46* 0.68*

Associated Press AtI

Survey (N=37) 0.46* 0.04 0.06 0.33*

*p>.05, N=50 for all correlations with the exception for those with the Open Budget Index and the AP study

Fraction of variables reported to WB: Percentage of 172 variables requested by the World Bank that are reported by a country (Hollyer, Rosendorff & Vreeland 2010, replication data available at www.jameshollyer.com).

Economic & Institutional Transparency, Political Transparency, Overall Transparency: Kaufmann et al 2005

Open Budget Index N=40: Ninety-two questions inquire about the public availability, timeliness, and comprehensiveness of a country’s budget reports. Questions largely build on criteria outlined by “International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its Code of Good Practices on Fiscal Transparency, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in its Best

8 Little variation exists in the Hollyer et al measure among the countries included in these analyses, and the two-way

scatter suggested that the United Arab Emirates was an outlier on both variables, therefore driving the results.

17

Practices for Budget Transparency, and the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) in its Lima Declaration of Guidelines on Auditing Precepts” (Open Budget Index 2010, 14-15).

Our government openness measure also correlates fairly strongly with the findings of the AP study

on government responsiveness to information requests (r=0.46), which is stronger than the correla-

tion between the AP measure and the three Bellver and Kaufmann transparency measures (not

shown in the table). This finding lends credibility to the government openness measure, as the AP

study very nicely captures a single instance of the more general phenomenon referred to in the

Quality of Government survey question.

The coefficients in Table 2 suggest that the QoG survey measures do tap into a similar phe-

nomenon as the AP study, the Open Budget and World Bank’s transparency measures. That the

association is not stronger may of course derive from measurement error in experts’ assessments,

but may also arise from the fact that our measures tap into a somewhat different aspect of trans-

parency, or the measurement noise in these other measures.

A conclusion of the analyses thus far is that the whistleblower protection component has been

difficult to verify in terms of available qualitative and quantitative data, and has considerably less

variation among countries in the sample. This may be the product of a number of factors. The

question itself requires experts to weigh in a number of factors: the risk of disclosure, which itself

depends on the existence of channels and procedures via which to file complaints, but also the

willingness of the media to protect the identity of sources, as well as an assessment of possible neg-

ative consequences that may range from extreme social stigmatization to loss of employment to

physical safety. The mechanisms to discourage whistleblowing may to a greater extent be formed by

organizational praxis than by legislative and administrative measures. A similar issue may exist with

respect to the question of publicity. The question requires an assessment both of civil servants will-

ingness to reveal abuses or conversely journalists likelihood to investigate abuses, as well as the

likelihood that media channels will publicize any detected abuses. The fact that several factors

weigh in to the question may account for the observed divergence in assessments. As a final step in

shedding light on the validity of these measures, we examine their association with measures of

basic rights and freedoms.

In an attempt to explore these problems with an analysis of convergent validity – whether the

measurements correlated with factors with which theory predicts – we consider the relationship to

18

measures of basic rights and freedoms. More specifically, we also hypothesize that whistleblower

protections should correlate with free speech, and that the publicity component should be associat-

ed with a free press. Table 3 shows that the three dimensions of transparency examined here have

strong and statistically significant associations with other measures of rights and liberties. Both

Cingranelli and Richard's index of empowerment rights and Freedom House's measure of civil

liberties are conglomerate measures that capture the overall extent to which basic rights are pro-

tected and de facto honored in a country, and these measures are strongly associated with publicity

and in particular with our access to information measure.

TABLE 3. CORRELATIONS BETWEEN TRANSPARENCY COMPONENTS AND OTHER BASIC RIGHTS

(PEARSON’S R)

Empowerment Rights Index

FH Civil Liberties

FH Freedom of Expression and Belief

FH Press Freedom

Freedom of Speech

Access to Information 0.57*** 0.66*** 0.58*** 0.67*** 0.43***

Whistleblower protection 0.16 0.24 0.19 0.21 0.36***

Publicity 0.48*** 0.43*** 0.47*** 0.49*** 0.45***

N=52 *p<.10, **p<.05, ***p<.001

Freedom of Expression and Belief: freedom and independence of the media and other cultural expressions; the freedom of religious groups to practice their faith and express themselves; the academic freedom and freedom from extensive political indoctrination in the educational system; and the ability of the people to engage in private (political) discussions without fear of harassment or arrest by the authorities.

Press Freedom: Whether media actors are protected by laws and regulations, free from political pressures and controls, and free from economic influences and repressive actions. (reversed so that higher values correspond to greater freedom)

Freedom of Speech: Cingranelli & Richards Human Rights Data Government censorship and/or ownership of the media

(including radio, TV, Internet, and domestic news agencies). Higher values indicate less government control.

Empowerment Rights Index: This is an additive index constructed from the Foreign Movement, Domestic Movement, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly & Association, Workers’ Rights, Electoral Self-Determination, and Freedom of Religion indicators. It ranges from 0 (no government respect for these seven rights) to 14 (full government respect for these seven rights).

Civil Liberties: Civil liberties allow for the freedoms of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy without interference from the state.

The more specific hypotheses are, however, not fully substantiated by the data. Publicity does cor-

relate quite strongly with press freedom (r=.49) though not more so than it does with access to

information (.58). Similarly, whistleblower protection correlates more strongly with the Cingranelli

19

and Richard’s measure of Freedom of Speech than with any other variable considered here (r=.36);

this association is, however, not stronger than the link between freedom of speech and the other

two dimensions of transparency. Turning again to the comparison of the single transparency di-

mensions versus the transparency index, the findings reported in table 4 suggest that the access to

information measure is for the most part more strongly associated with existing measures of rights

and freedoms than the transparency index.

Composite index of transparency

The three component measures in theory can be seen to complement one another in the sense that

all three are arguably needed in order for the general public to be able to obtain information on the

goings on, and in particular regarding misdeeds and abuses, in the public sector. If the public is not

able to access records on basic rules and resource flows, or insiders or investigative journalists can-

not or do not routinely expose abuses in the media, the professed beneficial effects of transparency

will unlikely materialize. We therefore argue for treating the three component measures as consti-

tuting parts of a conceptual package.

Combining component measures into a composite index must take into consideration both

empirical and theoretical arguments, however. Empirically, an exploratory principal component

analysis reveals that the three measures can be considered to load as a single factor, as the Eigen-

value of the second factor is .92 (and 1.54 for factor 1). The first factor explains only 51 percent of

the variation in the data, while the second factor, consisting of the whistleblower measure on its

own, explains an additional 31 percent. As we see the factors as complementary rather than tapping

into an underlying common aspect, we opt to combine them in a single index based on the princi-

pal-component model shown in table 4.

TABLE 4. PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS (VARIMAX ROTATION) OF TRANSPARENCY

MEASURES

Component Factor loadings Uniqueness

Government Openness 0.84 0.30

Publicity 0.78 0.39

Whistleblower protection 0.48 0.77

20

Exporatory analysis of transparency, quality of government and

corruption

Many international organizations, such as the WTO, the OECD, the World Bank and the IMF,

champion the spread of government transparency because of its benefits for reducing corruption,

facilitating trade and promoting growth, enhancing democracy and accountability, empowering

citizens, bettering environmental preservation, and overall leading to better quality of government

(QoG). In fact, many policy and academic debates tend to conflate transparency with many of these

desirable ends. More recent scholarship has begun to disaggregate some of these concepts, and

question the posited promise of transparency reforms (Lindstedt & Naurin 2011; Kolstad & Wiig

2009; Bastida & Benito2007; Fenster 2006; Stasavage 2004; MacCoun 2006).

The most widely used argument linking transparency to better practices in government opera-

tions build on the logic of principal-agent theory. Transparency increases the likelihood of detect-

ing malfeasance and consequently also punishment, and will thereby deter the abuse of public pow-

er. Bauhr and Grimes (2011) call into question one of basic assumptions upon which this link

builds, namely that exposure of corrupt institutions will produce public indignation and pressure

for accountability and reform. If transparency exposes institutions rife with venality, it may instead

alter perceptions about the extent and entrenchment of corruption in society. If engagement in

anti-corruption work is seen as a collective action problem (Person, Rothstein and Teorell 2010)

where individual action critically depends on expectations about others’ behavior, information con-

firming the pervasiveness of corruption may instead breed resignation and withdrawal from public

and civic endeavors. Transparency may, in other words, undermine citizens’ willingness to engage in

monitoring and scrutiny of public office holders, and by extension also diminish pressure for ac-

countability and reform (Bauhr 2011, Rose-Ackerman 1999; Smulovitz & Perruzzotti 2000; Peruz-

zotti & Smulovitz 2006).

Although there are reasons to call into question claims of causation in the link between corrup-

tion and transparency, the arguments regarding the potential benefits of increased transparency are

fairly well established, and numerous studies suggest that transparency is associated with lower

levels of corruption (IMF, 2001; Gerring and Thacker, 2004; Islam 2006; Kaufmann 2002; Kurtz-

man, et al., 2004; Lindstedt and Naurin, 2010; Montinola and Jackman, 2002; OECD, 2002; Rein-

ikka and Svensson, 2005; Rose-Ackerman, 1999; Siegle, 2001; UNODC, 2004). The indicators of

good government examined here include the two most established – Transparency International’s

21

corruption perception index and the World Bank’s control of corruption – as well as two additional

measures, Freedom House’s functioning of government indicator and an impartiality index, also

built from data from the Quality of Government’s survey.

Government openness shows the strongest and most robust connection to quality of govern-

ment in the bivariate analyses. Interestingly, however, in the models in which GDP per capita is

controlled for, all of the transparency dimensions are systematically related to QoG indicators.

Even whistleblower protection is associated with all four QoG indicators in a way that adds to the

explanatory power of the model.9 Interestingly enough, most of these estimates remain largely un-

changed if the Bellver and Kaufmann measure of economic and institutional transparency (dis-

cussed in table 1) is included in the model. Our transparency measures is, in other words, more

strongly associated with measures of good government than a measure that builds on several

sources that themselves contain assessments not only of transparency but also of corruption and

good government more generally.

TABLE 6. TRANSPARENCY AND QUALITY OF GOVERNMENT (OLS UNSTANDARDIZED

REGRESSION COEFFICIENTS, R2 IN PARENTHESES)

TI Corruption Perception Index

WB Control of Corruption

FH Functioning of Government

QoG Impartiality Index

Without controls

Access to Information .69*** (.18) .29*** (.15) 1.74*** (.43) .43*** (.28)

Whistleblower protection .10 (0) .06 (0) .50 (0) .19 (0)

Publicity .40 (0) .12 (0) 1.25*** (.15) .32** (.10)

Transparency index .66** (.12) .26*** (.08) 1.86*** (.36) .48*** (.26)

Controlling for GDP per capita (R2=.59) (R

2=.6) (R

2=.10) (R

2=.31)

Access to Information .44*** (.66) .18** (.64) 1.62*** (.46) .34*** (.48)

Whistleblower protection .42** (.62) .21** (.63) .78 (.12) .31*** (.37)

Publicity .49*** (.66) .17** (.63) 1.32*** (.28) .36*** (.35)

Transparency index .61*** (.7) .24***(.67) 1.82*** (.45) .46*** (.56)

N=51. b-values and R2 in parentheses *p<.10, **p<.05, ***p<.001

GDP per capita from 2002-2005 World Development Indicators

9 It should be noted that the estimate for whistleblower protections disappears when the log of GDP per capita is con-

trolled for instead of the untransformed measure (all other estimates remain the same).

22

Corruption Perception Index 2000-2009; Control of Corruption from 2002-2008; Functioning of Government 2005-2006: (0-16) measures “to what extent the freely elected head of government and a national legislative representative determine the policies of the government; if the government is free from pervasive corruption; and if the government is accountable to the electorate between elections and operates with openness and transparency” (Teorell, Jan, Marcus Samanni, Sören Holmberg and Bo Roth-stein. 2011. The Quality of Government Dataset, version 6 April 11. University of Gothenburg: The Quality of Government). Impartiality Index 2010 (see Teorell 2009).

We turn now again to the question of whether the transparency measures relate independently to

good government or whether they together capture a common unobserved quality that matters.

Looking at the second set of models that control for GDP per capita, the transparency index shows

a stronger link to all of the QoG measures with the exception of the Freedom House functioning

of government indicator. The explained variation of the TI and World Bank measures, as well as

the QoG institutes impartiality index, is consistently bettered by a few percentage points with the

transparency index as compared to the individual dimensions. That the transparency index is not

more strongly associated with the Freedom House measure is perhaps unremarkable when consid-

ered in the light of the findings presented above regarding the transparency-democracy association,

as the FH measure includes not only corruption but also indicators of democracy as well (see notes

table 3). The conclusion that appears to be emerging from these two analyses so far is that the

combination of the three transparency dimensions may be more strongly linked to some character-

istics of the political system while not for others. We will return to this issue in the concluding dis-

cussion.

Conclusions

Transparency, despite a surge of attention in policy and academic arenas, has received insufficient,

rigorous theoretical attention and therefore remains somewhat shrouded in conceptual ambiguity.

Much like concepts such as democracy or good governance, transparency is often discussed in con-

junction with a host of attributes considered integral to good government, so much so that they are

seldom disaggregated theoretically and empirically. A transparent organization does not by defini-

tion have a strong internal audit system, nor by necessity invite constituents, citizens or consumers

to participate, provide input, and express grievances. A state may go to great lengths to make in-

formation accessible and publically available in a country in which citizens’ capacity to act on the

information are low. A first step in the analytical dissection of transparency is therefore to disen-

tangle it from other complementary aspects of good governance (accountability mechanisms, par-

23

ticipatory arrangements), as well as from the societal preconditions that shape whether transparency

and other institutional arrangements operate as intended.

This paper seeks to contribute to this conceptual debate, advancing a definition of transparen-

cy that consists of three dimensions: government openness, whistleblower protection, and publici-

ty. We also carry out a first cut analysis of data yielded from a survey asking public administration

experts to make an assessment on each of these three dimensions. Though still in need of addition-

al confirmatory analyses, the data seem (thus far) credible in light of existing qualitative and quanti-

tative data and perform largely in concurrence with theoretical predictions and available data on the

countries studied. Countries rated as more transparent along the dimensions of access to infor-

mation and publicity also tend to have less corruption, and to a greater extent honor other basic

human rights and liberties. To reiterate, we do not see the analyses presented here as supporting

causal arguments. Government openness may aid in curbing corruption and bringing about better

quality of government, but the two may also simply arise in a large process of political develop-

ment. We have argued elsewhere that there are compelling reasons to doubt that transparency re-

forms will, independent of other factors, eradicate corruption (Bauhr and Grimes 2011).

The predictions regarding transparency in both academically and in policy discussions contain

a host of assumptions that most certainly require continued investigation. The Quality of Govern-

ment’s survey offers one attempt at measuring transparency levels at the country level, but contin-

ued attempts to construct indicators and collect more and more reliable data are in order.

24

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